Amusing, readable, occasionally moving account of life during wartime by a frustrated would-be hero.
Whimsical, at times poignant memoir of the WWII.
Hotchner (Louisiana Purchase, 1996, etc.) provides an example of an all but vanished “laughter-in-uniform” genre that grew from America’s last widely supported war. A St. Louis native and graduate of Washington University Law School, the author eyed his opportunity to get into uniform right after Pearl Harbor. When flat feet and poor depth perception kept him from being a combat pilot, he accepted life as a lowly GI and was suffering his way through boot camp when a commanding officer, noting that Hotchner’s resumé included student theater, ordered him to write a patriotic musical to raise money for war widows. For the rest of the war he tried to make his way to the front lines but was thwarted when the military found him useful for writing company rousers, arranging skits, or making a movie about US anti-submarine patrols. Along the way, he comforted Clark Gable, who had enlisted after his wife, Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash; fired Alan Ladd as narrator of his anti-sub film; and befriended the acid-penned Dorothy Parker. He’d known Tennessee Williams as a student in St. Louis, and rubbed shoulders with such Hollywood types making films for the war effort as Frank Capra, William Holden, and Ronald Reagan. (Today, Hotchner is a partner in actor Paul Newman’s line of food products.) Hotchner’s descriptions of 1930s complacency about Hitler, isolationism, attitudes toward the draft, young men’s Hollywood-shaped illusions of war and glory, and women’s economic and sexual “liberation” as they assumed war-related jobs are all evocative. And he has a good eye for the telling detail, as when he runs his hand over the wooden railing on the Queen Mary with its scratched initials from the thousands of GIs the ship has previously transported to their uncertain fate.
Amusing, readable, occasionally moving account of life during wartime by a frustrated would-be hero.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8262-1432-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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